Fall in line
Music concerts and festivals are a distant memory today. The last one I attended was the U2 Joshua Tree concert in Bombay. I love these festivals — the energy, the vibe, the music — but one of the most frustrating things is having to wait in line for a drink. What’s also painful is that every time you want to buy one, you need to walk over to the drinks counter which is usually at one corner of the venue. As a result of this, my hunch is that people buy way lesser drinks at concerts and also complain about how hard it was to get one.
What if you could solve this? It would not only increase sales, but also improve the customer experience (no lines for buying a drink!) — win and win!
This was the idea behind Quench, an experiment back in 2015, to create a bar in which instead of the customer having to walk over, the bar could walk to the customer. All you needed was get a great sales person, strap on an apparatus on their back and let them into the crowd to sell! You don’t even need that good of a sales person to sell a drink to a person jumping to thumping music.
Super excited about the potential, I ended up ordered 2 of the backpacks and decided to give this a shot at one of the university festivals. The plan was to make virgin mojitos — Sprite + mint leaves + blue curaçao — fill up the canisters, walk around and sell it to thirsty souls. Selling an alcoholic beverage would have been more lucrative, but that was complicated. I had some prior experience of selling stuff during college festivals — I ran a small waffle store with a friend during my college festival a few years earlier — and I was pretty confident that I’d manage to pull something off.
I landed up on the morning of the festival assuming the organisers would be kind enough to let me sell, but that’s not how things work (I knew that already, but was pushing my luck). I was supposed to register in advance and pay a fee to be able to sell. I was really naive to think they’d let me in. So I packed my stuff and took a long train ride back home (for people familiar with Delhi, this was North Campus to Gurgaon) and that was the end of Quench.
I did use the apparatus at a bunch of house parties — it was highly effective at getting the party started — and proved to be a good investment after all.
I still believe that concert and festival organisers can easily increase their beverage sales by 2–3X if they tried something like this. As a customer, I would surely buy a drink if someone walked up and offered it to me, especially if I’d just gotten out of mosh pit. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen anything like this in action at any of the music festivals in India. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, which is why this isn’t a reality already or I need to visit more music festivals!
If you ever find yourself keen on giving this a shot (when we have music festivals again) do give me a shout! I’d love to help! Until then, let’s fall in line.
This essay is a part of my 30 day writing challenge. You can read more about why I’m doing it here
